[Cadre-politics] FYI: tucows is being DDOS

[Dan MacNeil]

We re-sell tucows domain registration. This allows us to offer 
registration for $10 per year instead of telling people to pay $35/year 
@ register.com and with better service.

They also offer the chance to re-sell most of what an ISP can provide, 
though we have not chosen to do take advantage of that.

Since we do only domain registration through them, The outage below does 
not effect us.



-------- Original Message --------
Subject: OpenSRS Live Reseller Update - DDOS Attack 05/03/2006
Date: Thu, 4 May 2006 02:08:20 -0400
From: <>
To: OpenSRS at opensrs.net

To all:

Beginning at approximately noon Wednesday May 3rd the Tucows network has 
been under a severe DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service) attack whose 
impact has been amplified by the attack's use of recursive name servers.

The extent of the DDOS attack was enough to knock out two of the three 
upstream providers to our collocation facility. Because of this, for the 
first four and a half hours of the attack, it was assumed by all 
involved that this was a network outage. It was only when the upstream 
providers were able to recover from the initial blow that we were able 
to determine that it was in fact an DDOS attack.

The attack, while apparently directed at a single website, had an impact 
beyond its target making large portions of our network inaccessible for 
periods of time throughout the day. While the site under attack used our 
Managed DNS Service, Tucows is not the domain's registrar and as such 
our options for resolving without impact have been limited. Our 
operations staff, along with those of both our colocation provider and 
their upstream providers have been working diligently to return service 
to normal.

Our operations staff will be working through the night to make this 
situation as painless as possible. I can only tell you all that I am 
sorry and we will continue to do everything in our power to make this 
better.


Regards,
Elliot Noss